Putin’s Poisons

Vladimir Putin is the current totalitarian ruler of Russia, which isn’t in itself an historically surprising circumstance. From the Tsars to the Bolsheviks and on through the present, a single despotic person has generally ruled over Russia, and frequently over a large part of the contiguous territories of Europe and Asia. Unlike Stalin, who was an imposing physical person and who murdered wantonly and in massive numbers, Putin is a small, pale, reptilian person who rules and murders much more after the fashion of a snake. There is a certain morbid fascination in watching a current head of state selecting and deploying a range of improbable toxins against a fairly random list of perceived traitors, enemies, journalists and spies. Poisoning is only an attractive option for murder when one wishes to have plausible deniability, yet Putin’s numerous deployments of poisons to date have been a comedy of errors and uncritical…